‘There is a sweetness in the way we shape our lives around light’ ... two girls celebrate Diwali in Bangladesh. Photograph: Zakir Chowdhury/Barcroft Images

In a room just to the left of the Sackler Octagon hangs one of Tate Britain’s most-visited paintings. Now 130 years old, oil on canvas, and a little over 7ft tall, John Singer Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose depicts two girls in the early evening of full summer, standing amid a flower garden lighting paper lanterns.

Sargent’s ambition was to capture the brief flush of twilight, though it proved a vexing and elusive quality. “Paints are not bright enough and then the effect only lasts 10 minutes,” he wrote to his sister in frustration. Still, to stand before the painting today is to marvel at the particularity of its light: at the gloamy incandescence that falls on the petals and dress-folds and soft-dipped faces; at the lanterns that glow a shrill and ferocious orange.

There is something in Sargent’s painting, and even his exasperation, that I think captures the essence of our relationship with light – how we chase and revere it, how we bestow upon it a sense of ceremony and wonder. It is there in the soft sighs of rapture that accompany each firework display, in the neck-craning awe that carries us to the aurora borealis, to Quito’s festival of light, or even to inch along the Fylde coast just to see the Blackpool illuminations. It’s there, too, in the stories we tell ourselves of sun deities, star signs, eclipses; in the solemnity of candles lit for Hannukah, Diwali, Christmas; in our celebration of May mornings and solstices, in the great heights we scale just to see the sun rise or set.

There is a sweetness in the way we shape our lives around light – in the places we choose to live and work and travel, in the simple rituals of dimmer switch, chandelier, table lamp, in the way we seek out the precise ratio of sky to earth that pleases us.

I have lived in the half-gloom of basement flats, in the deep, damp darkness of the countryside and the restless glow of the city. I have found myself drawn to Florida, California, New Mexico, to Cornwall and Provence and Kent, just to see how the light sits. I have learned that the light I love best has a softness and a giddiness, a sense of warmth and mischief.

Today then I live in a tall building beside the sea. Some years before Sargent painted his Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, JMW Turner – that “painter of light” declared the skies here “the loveliest in all Europe,” and from my window I watch them move above the harbour, the day’s soft shift of light from the the milk-wash of morning to the mild hysteria of sunset. Most days I think of how words fail to capture them, as if the paints are not bright enough and then the effect only lasts 10 minutes.

It was Robert Hass, the American poet laureate, who wrote of how “desire is full of endless distances”, and in our love of light I think there is something of this quality too – of the magic and yearning for the intangible. Because no matter the matches struck, the switches flipped, the elaborate way we may dress it up in expensive shades and fancy glass bulbs, hang paper lanterns in flower gardens or fling it out into night skies in bursts of gunpowder and flame, our relationship with light will always be in some way unmet and unconsummated. As Rebecca Solnit once wrote of the colour blue, “Some things cannot be owned.” Rather, light lies a bedfellow of music, electricity, love, as one of the great impalpable joys of life, a cause for celebration and wonder, a source of endless desire.